Posts Tagged: "CBM institution decisions"

On Wednesday, July 11th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in Apple v. ContentGuard Holdings vacating a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to institute a covered business method (CBM) validity proceeding… Amazingly, the Federal Circuit’s vacature of the PTAB’s determination of unpatentable subject matter came after appeals from petitioners Google and Apple sent the case to the Federal Circuit. Although the panel of administrative patent judges (APJs) determined the challenged claims to be unpatentable, they also granted a motion from ContentGuard to amend claims which substituted the unpatentable claims. This appeal gave ContentGuard the ability to cross appeal the PTAB’s determination that the ‘280 patent was subject to CBM review.

In a surprisingly restrained decision, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) released a decision denying institution of a covered business method (CBM) review proceeding on a patent that is tangentially related to financial activity… Ford alleged that its claim was further supported by the ‘080 patent’s description of market regions for which the consolidated models could be constructed. “The configuration process/system claimed in the ‘080 patent is at least ‘incidental to’ or ‘complementary to’ a financial activity, such as the sale of automobiles,” Ford’s petition reads.

Earlier today the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) declined to institute a covered business method (CBM) review of U.S. Patent No. 6,006,227, which is owned by Mirror World Technologies, LLC. The decision is significant not only because the PTAB refused to institute a covered business method review, but because the panel — Administrative Patent Judges Thomas Giannetti, David McKone, and Barbara Parvis — cited the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Enfish v. Microsoft when they found that the challenged claims of the ‘227 patent were not abstract.